“Harper won’t acknowledge that I am not her real enemy,” Broch continued. “But here, in the Crossing, she can make no move against me. So she seethes, always.”

  Seethes. Yes, that seemed to fit with the little I knew of Harper.

  I rolled my eyes as another thought struck me. “You weren’t fasting,” I breathed. “You don’t eat or drink.”

  Broch tilted the tankard toward me to show it was empty and quite dry. “Although I do miss both, when I watch humans enjoying their food,” he admitted.

  I finished the glass of whisky, which warmed me more than the fire did. “Broch, can I ask…where were you during the night of the solstice?”

  “The night your mother died?” He shook his head. “I was right here for the early part of it. Juda was…” He paused and pursed his lips briefly. “…somewhat incoherent.”

  “Drunk?”

  Broch shook his head. “Juda doesn’t drink much. His vice is spreadsheets. Data. Sometimes Juda finds life a bit overwhelming and tries to retreat. The effects can be unsettling.”

  “A psychotic break?”

  “I don’t think he’s ever been formally diagnosed. But he was not himself that night.”

  “How?”

  Broch shrugged. “The usual. Talking to people who were not there. Shouting. Not recognizing any of us. Benedict and I walked him home when the inn closed at 11. Ben gave him a shot and we tucked him into bed once we knew it had kicked in. He would have been out for hours. Four at least.”

  That meant Juda would have been sleeping off the drug long past midnight.

  “Ghaliya likes him,” I observed.

  “He’s a gentle man,” Broch said. “Even at his wildest, he has never lashed out at anyone.”

  “Then these…turns are common?”

  “I’ve seen many of them,” Broch confirmed. “Juda is like the idiot-savants who can outthink Einstein, but cannot sit through a meal without upsetting someone.”

  I wondered how Ghaliya would feel about Juda once she had seen one of these moods of his in action.

  “And the rest of your night?” I prompted Broch. “You didn’t sleep, I presume. You don’t sleep at all?”

  “No, not the way humans do, although around this time of day, my energy is at its lowest and I linger by the fire until the sun sets.” He pushed the tankard away from him. “I helped Hirom roll four empty barrels back to his still, as I don’t feel the cold.”

  I weighed that up. “I need to see the still.”

  “Why?” Broch’s eyes narrowed. “I understand your need to find who killed your mother, Anna. You’re clinging to logic because it lets you pretend everything is still the old normal you knew. But have you considered that uncovering who killed your mother would upset everyone in Haigton?”

  “Everyone wanted her dead?” I was appalled. Horrified.

  “No! Not at all. I mean only that if you were to learn who killed her, if anyone did, then no matter who it is, we are all of us going to be shocked and dismayed. Everyone knows everyone in Haigton Crossing, Anna. We are family in a way that mere blood relatives could never understand.”

  “So because you don’t want to deal with the fact that someone in this town is a stone-cold killer, I should just stop digging into it?”

  “That isn’t what I meant, either,” he replied. “The Sheriff’s office—”

  “Are doing nothing about it,” I said. “I’m starting to think that it is something to do with this town. The air or the water…I don’t know. But the captain I first spoke to about moving his ass on this had genuinely forgotten all about the murder. I can’t trust the Sheriff’s office to do right by my mother.”

  Broch nodded. “You’re probably right. People do tend to forget about us here.”

  “So I need to know how you spent your night after tucking Juda away.”

  “Rolling barrels.”

  “For six whole hours?”

  “For four, at least,” Broch said. “Have you ever rolled a barrel?”

  I shook my head.

  “It is not straightforward, because their sides are not flat. The curve sends them in all directions. Shepherding four of them is very slow. I think Hirom’s still is just over a mile from here. But it took hours to get there and hours to roll the full barrels back here.”

  Of course, Hirom would need to replace the empties.

  I got up. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  “Of course.”

  I went over to the bar. “Hirom, what were you doing the night my mother died?”

  Hirom didn’t hesitate. “You should ask Broch to confirm this. We were rolling barrels to my clearing. Then back here not long before dawn—enough time for me to snooze for a bit.” He raised his brow at me.

  “Thank you,” I told him and headed back to the table.

  “Hirom confirmed it?” Broch’s question sounded like a statement.

  “It seems you’re in the clear,” I admitted.

  Broch got to his feet. “Then I will leave you to your enquiries. Hirom wants to speak to you, I believe.”

  Broch left and I moved over to the counter. It was getting late in the morning. Time for me to head into the kitchen and start preparing both lunch and dinner, but I could spare a few moments.

  “Broch said you wanted to speak to me?” I asked him.

  “Did he now?” Hirom moved up the counter, away from me, bent and retrieved a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, and brought it back to me. He put it on the counter. “Most folks ‘round here are pagans, so you won’t be getting all the fuss you’d get back home. We tend to do the heavy celebrating at the solstice.”

  The box had Merry Christmas written in a lovely flowing hand on it.

  I touched the box. “It’s Christmas Day,” I breathed. “I had forgotten.”

  “Like I said, most folks round here…December 25th is just another day. Thamina used to fret about it every year until she got used to it, then she just switched all the lights and baubles and decorations to the solstice, and carried on. But you’re new…”

  “Thank you, Hirom. Shall I open it now?”

  His face turned pink. “Do it later,” he said gruffly. “You’re busy. I don’t mind.”

  I picked up the package. “I really do have a lot to do, today,” I admitted. I paused. “Broch said that Juda was not himself, on the solstice.”

  “He’s not himself so often, one could say he was being himself,” Hirom said. “He was acting up, for sure.”

  I lifted the package a little. “Thank you, again.”

  ●

  My morning had been so intense and revelatory that mundane chores like making lunch and dinner were exactly what I needed. One of the items in the groceries that had been delivered was a large frozen whole chicken. I had let it defrost and I would put it on to roast after lunch. Now the chicken seemed doubly appropriate. I would also put all the extras out tonight. Stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits.

  There was a can of pumpkin puree on the shelf, so I made a pumpkin pie, too.

  Hirom’s gift sat untouched on the counter by the door until lunch was done. I took it upstairs and settled in the wing chair. On the little table next to the chair was one of my mother’s notebooks. I stared at the cover, not really seeing it.

  Everything in the notebooks was true.

  My mother had not been suffering from a strange form of dementia. She had not been living in a fantasy world. Well, she had been, but that world was as real as the one I had left behind in Los Angeles.

  I let out a deep sigh. I would have to read her journals far more closely. I would read them again, this time with my receptors open. My mother could teach me a lot about this world she had pulled me into.

  Chapter Twenty

  Juda, son of jinns…of course he would be the one to sense the borders of our home were crumbling. He is so sensitive to enclosures and boundaries.

  Even Trevalyan missed the signs, and of everyone in the Crossing, I thought he would see them. He misses nothing, as a rule.

  I am grateful to Juda for drawing my attention to the failing wards. But now I worry that I won’t find the recipes needed in time to renew them. There is so little time left…

  I put the notebook down. It was the last notebook my mother had been working on. Now I was reading her words with a different mindset, I was learning so much about the people I had met.

  Juda was the son of jinns. I had read that before and thought it was my mother being fanciful or indulging in poetry, for the alliteration ran off the tongue easily.

  The son of jinns. Genies, in western parlance. How literal was my mother being? Was his father literally a jinn? And his father before him? Was Juda a jinn? He did not live in a bottle, nor was his lower half made of vapor, but that might simply be Hollywood embellishment. But clearly, jinns were sensitive to boundaries. Were they used to being captive and held inside tight borders? That would explain why Juda had sensed the failing wards.

  I couldn’t discount anything my mother said, anymore. I had to take everything at face value until I had a better understanding of how this new normal worked.

  While I contemplated that, my gaze fell upon Hirom’s gift. I still hadn’t unwrapped it.

  I put the notebook aside and picked up the parcel. The string was tied in a bow, and I tugged it undone, and withdrew a scuffed shoe box from the paper, and opened it.

  A statue lay in a nest of paper strips, the wood glowing, for it was highly polished.

  I withdrew the statue carefully and put it on the table to admire it. It was a lovely thing, showing a woman in what looked like Roman clothing, her hand resting on a deer’s head. The deer had antlers.

  The flat bottom of the statue had a name carved into it.

  Diana.

  My heart beat harder. Had Trevalyan told Hirom about the deer that had approached me? But that had only been yesterday…and I was almost certain that Hirom had carved this statue himself. He must have started carving it the moment I arrived in town.

  Or perhaps even before then, for as soon as my mother had been found dead, the town would have known the next of kin would arrive.

  But what had moved Hirom to make this carving? This version of Artemis? And for a woman he’d never met?

  Haigton Crossing is different.

  I cleared off space on one of the shelves opposite the sofa and put the statue on it. Then I went downstairs to finish the preparations for dinner.

  ●

  Trevalyan is fading. Since Max died, he seems to have lost all interest in anything, and he lived for the power, the rush of the spell. He was utterly brilliant and now he…isn’t. My heart breaks, for his loss and for me, who can never be anything but a friend to him.

  Worst of all is that now I can never leave the Crossing with Trevalyan. The Crossing knows….

  “I can’t believe you’re still reading those old notebooks of Nanna’s,” Ghaliya told me, drawing my attention back to the dining room.

  My gaze fell upon Trevalyan, who was gnawing at a strip of bacon, his fingers greasy, and a look of pleasure upon his face. I felt my cheeks heat and looked away, before my gaze drew his attention.

  “There’s lots of useful information in the notebooks,” I told Ghaliya. “Including recipes.”

  “For hiccups?” Ghaliya said, with a wise expression. My gaze fell upon the pretty little flower pendant she wore. It was painted, carved wood and I had no doubt it was Hirom’s Christmas gift to her.

  “For food,” I said patiently. “There’s some recipes Mom used to make for me when I was a kid, that I had completely forgotten about. I must try them out.”

  In fact, I had spent the last twenty-four hours devouring as much of her notebooks as I could. They weren’t journals to me. They were encyclopedias. I learned a lot. Including that my mother had struggled to cast spells. They did not come easily to her, and often did not work. Sometimes she blamed the spell. In odd moments, she was candid enough with herself to admit that she was the weak link.

  After yesterday morning’s shocks, the calmness of the hours that had followed had let me relax and given me time to think.

  There was still no reason to stay in Haigton Crossing despite what I knew about the place now. In fact, that was even more reason to leave.

  Ghaliya would need advanced medical care if she continued to carry the baby. Trevalyan had been vague about what he could see of the future, but he had given me hope. And that suddenly made it more urgent that I prepare for that future. Ghaliya, too.

  The flaring hope, the possibility that Ghaliya might successfully carry the child, told me the degree to which I believed Trevalyan. That I wanted to believe him.

  I watched Ghaliya devour her bacon and eggs, toast and hash browns. It was reassuring to see her eat so well. Perhaps the nausea was done with her for now.

  ●

  I had just finished clearing away breakfast when an email from the Coroner’s office landed.

  I wiped off my hands and sat on the stool by the steel counter to read it.

  The attachment to the impersonal email was the coroner’s report on my mother’s death. I read through the report three times, trying to wrap my head around it.

  Frida touched my arm, startling me. I looked up at her.

  She waved toward the scrap bucket.

  “Yes, I’m taking it out in a minute,” I murmured. My brain was still immersed in the dry phrasing of the coroner’s report.

  Frida waved toward me, her eyes widening.

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “Just some bad news.” I got to my feet, and walked stiffly out of the kitchen, across the hall and into the bar.

  Hirom was right where I had expected him to be. I sank onto the stool and put my phone gently on the counter.

  Hirom came over. “News?” he asked softly.

  “The coroner has determined that my mother died by her own hand. Suicide.”

  “Damn,” Hirom breathed. “What are you going to do about it?”

  What was I going to do? What could I do?

  “Clearly…” I said, very slowly, reaching for words as I spoke them, “I can’t go back to Los Angeles straight away. I have to sort this out, Hirom. I can’t leave it there. I can’t have everyone thinking my mother took her own life, because she wasn’t like that. She wasn’t the sort of person who would even consider suicide an option.”

  Hirom grimaced. “I wouldn’t have said so, either. Not the Thamina I knew.”

  I nodded. “Yes, exactly. You could argue that I didn’t know her very well, after so many years apart, but I’ve been reading her journals, and the core of the woman was in those pages. That woman had not given up on anything. She had plans.”

  Hirom scratched the back of his head. “But if she didn’t do it herself, that means….”

  “Someone in this town did it,” I finished.

  Hirom plucked at his shirt. “I don’t know I like that so much.”

  “Neither do I,” I admitted. “But unless someone sneaked into the town, killed her, then sneaked out, it has to be someone who lives here. And my mother didn’t have friends outside the town. She had a lawyer that she sort of knew. And she talked to me. That’s it.”

  “So it was either a random act of craziness by someone who just happened to be passing by, or it was someone in the Crossing,” Hirom summarized.

  “And most murders are committed by friends and family.”

  Hirom considered that for a long while, then blew out his breath in a long, soft raspberry. “Yep. Sucks.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  December 14: Sweet Harper…she is in such a tizz about her missing summoning token. She asked me to find it for her, today. That shows how desperate she is to retrieve it. She says it was stolen. She was keeping it in a warded bag, but it’s gone missing. There are not a lot of people who could get past a warded bag.

  I put the journals away and went downstairs for one of Hirom’s coffees. I felt sluggish and brain dead from reading for too long. But I couldn’t help but think that the more I got to know the people of this town, the quicker I could figure out who had killed my mother. And my mother’s journals were a short cut. Otherwise I would either have to spend years here, getting to know everyone, or else interrogate them to learn what I needed to know.

  Somehow, I didn’t think anyone in this town would sit still and let themselves be cross-examined. Not by me. I was nobody.

  As I was asking Hirom for the coffee, my phone buzzed. A rare phone call, and for once, I had two bars on the phone. The bar seemed to be the cellphone hotspot for the town. I didn’t know the number and there was no name, so I answered the call cautiously.

  “Anna?” the male voice asked. The voice was familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. And it wasn’t a robot.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Ummm…it’s Royston Harrish, Anna. Sorry to disturb you.”

  I sat up straighter. “Royston! Good god! It’s been…”

  “Years,” he finished. “I know. I’m so goddamn busy these days even Sally has forgotten what I look like. Your husband did me a solid, selling me the business. And I thought he was laying it on thick.”

  There was something odd about that, that I wanted to tease out, but Royston continued speaking. “I have an email that came to the admin address for the business, but it’s personal for you. And I don’t want to just delete it. That wouldn’t be right.”

  “Of course. Let me give you my email address.” I gave him my current email address. “Did you get this number from Jasper?” I added. I had always made sure Jasper had my current contact information, for reasons like this, while he couldn’t even keep his children up to date.

  I pushed the uncharitable thought away.

  “Actually, I got the number from your old employer. The production company. Thanks, Anna. I’ll send the email on to you as soon as I finish this call.”

  “Before you do, Royston, could you tell me what you meant by Jasper laying it on thick? About the business?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Royston said quickly. “Everyone talks up something they’re trying to sell. Turns out, Jasper wasn’t exaggerating about how good the business was.”